Bill Baer /bɛːr/

We’ve recently released the first administration toolkit for SharePoint Foundation and SharePoint Server 2010. The toolkit includes a new User Profile Replication Engine, a new Security Configuration Manifest, a new Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Connector, and the Load Testing Kit (LTK). User Profile Replication Engine The User Profile Replication Engine was first introduced as a standalone application in later adminisration toolkits for Office SharePoint Server 2007 to replicate profiles between Shared Services Providers (SSP).

Today we released a new whitepaper that provides prescriptive guidance about profile synchronization and My Site planning and administrative tasks for SharePoint Server 2010 that combines real world scenarios and step by step instructions with accompanying screenshots to help IT Professionals and Developers successfully understand, deploy, provision, and manage the services, components, and features that support and enable user profiles, synchronization, My Site Web sites, and more. Excerpt When designing a solution for business collaboration and social computing, it is important to think about a ‘social identity’ that represents each user in the organization.

This topic has frequented my Inbox over the past months, planning a My Site personal site deployment for 100,000+ users. In this post we’ll examine the issues and potential solutions. First it is important to understand that while a My Site personal site is a site collection in basic form, it’s instantiation via a browser request or managed code results in significantly greater overhead than a traditional collaboration-type site collection. The majority of overhead is presented through the numerous data building operations that occur both on the private and public pages associated with the template, private.

While attending Ask the Experts at the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Conference 2008, I was asked about migrating user accounts in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to a new login name programmatically, fortunately Windows SharePoint Services addressed user account migrations with the Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 post SP1 hotfix package 896593 which was followed by a number of applications including SPUserUtil Keith Richie corrected me today - SPUserUtil preceeded the MigrateUser API - Thanks Keith!

A e-mail dialogue came up with a colleague surrounding Profiles and Properties in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, with the questions specific to profile cleanup and management of changes in profile properties. How are inactive user profiles managed… How do I manage Active Directory property changes in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007’s profile database… After I sent my reply, I realized this was not the first time the question arrived in my inbox so I’ve decided to include the explanations here:

What happens when manually adding a user to a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Site Collection, who previously did not have a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 profile? Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 userinfo and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 profile are not hard-linked; what this means is when a new user is created in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 it does not get created in the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 profile store; the opposite of this is true as well - Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 -> Windows SharePoint Services 3.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 does not allow more than one connection to a domain; if you’d like to configure a custom import, such as a specific user filter (&(objectCategory=Person)(objectClass=User)), you can create a single connection with the common search base (DC=foo,DC=bar) and add a more restricted user filter to limit the users imported.

Typically there is no real impact in the event a user profile is removed from the SharePoint profiles database; the profile will be restored during a full or incremental import. Though the statement is true for the most part when only considering Windows SharePoint Services sites, the behavior varies considerable when including My Site sites in the scenario. Since Windows SharePoint Services content is stored as a table in the sites database, the content can be easily recovered and archived; however, though My Site/Personal site content is similar in this respect many of the end-user facing customization exists as a shared service within SharePoint Portal Server.